Picture a shop that ships forty orders a month through a marketplace. The monthly statement looks healthy: turnover is up, parcels go out, reviews come in. Then you put a single order on paper — one, not forty — and the picture changes. A €45 product that cost you €26, minus commission, minus payment costs, minus a box, tape and a label, minus the one return in every twelve orders. What is left is rarely what the owner expected.

That sum is the whole “should I build my own webshop or just sell on a marketplace” question. It is not a technology decision. It is a margin decision, and you can make it this week with a calculator and twenty quiet minutes.

Put one order on paper

Take your best-selling product and write down, step by step, what happens to its price.

Commission. Marketplaces take a cut of the sale price — commonly somewhere between five and twenty percent depending on the category, sometimes with a fixed fee per item on top. Your own shop takes nothing, but it does cost a fixed amount each month in platform or hosting fees. Divide that by your order volume and put it in the same column.

Payment costs. These exist in both worlds. An iDEAL transaction costs a fixed amount of a few tens of cents; cards and wallets are usually a small percentage plus a few cents. Bank transfer is cheap but costs you days and chasing. Cash on delivery, common in Morocco and much of the Middle East, is the expensive one: a higher fee, plus a real refusal rate.

Shipping and packing. Count the box, the tape, the label and the ten minutes of someone's time. If you offer free shipping above a threshold, work out how many orders actually cross it.

Returns. Count them for the last three months and divide by the number of orders. A ten percent return rate on a €45 item is not ten percent of your profit; it is often most of it, because you pay shipping twice and the item comes back unsellable often enough to matter.

Then do exactly the same sum for a slow mover. In our experience the two answers point in different directions, and that difference is the useful part.

On a marketplace, you are buying demand

The commission is not a tax. It is an advertising cost, and often a fair one: the people are already there, already searching, already willing to pay. The honest question to ask for each product is whether that customer would ever have found you otherwise. For a standard part that thirty other sellers also stock, probably not. For the thing you are locally known for, probably yes — and then you are paying a fifth of the price to be found by someone who would have called you anyway.

Two things you do not get. You rarely get the customer: no email address, no relationship, no way to tell them you now stock the matching item. And you do not control the rules — fees, ranking and policies change on someone else's schedule, and you adapt.

Your own shop gets paid back on the second order

The first order in your own shop is usually the expensive one. It carries an advert, or a flyer, or years of local reputation. The second and third cost almost nothing: the customer knows the address. So the value of your own shop is proportional to how often people come back. Coffee, parts, filters, feed, cosmetics — anything that gets used up — and the shop pays for itself. Something people buy once a decade, much less so.

The second reason is everything a marketplace will not let you do: bundles, collection in a time slot, a deposit on a reservation, a business invoice with a VAT number, a reorder button, a price only your trade customers see. These are not nice-to-haves; each one removes a phone call.

Most small shops end up doing both

Not as a compromise, but on purpose. Commodity lines go where the demand already is and pay their commission without complaint. Products with a story, a margin or a repeat cycle live in your own shop, where you keep the customer. One rule stops it becoming a mess: stock lives in one place. If the marketplace and your own shop each keep their own count, you will oversell, and cancelling a paid order costs you more than the order was worth.

And put something in the marketplace parcel that points home. Not a discount war — just a card offering the refill reminder, the fitting guide or free local collection they can only get directly from you.

What to do this week

  • Take your best seller and your slowest product and write out the full sum per order for both, returns included. Twenty minutes, on paper.
  • Look up your return rate for the last three months. If nobody is counting, start counting today.
  • Decide one thing: which two or three products belong in your own shop first. Not the whole catalogue — the ones people buy again.

If the numbers come out close and you would rather not guess, that is exactly the conversation we enjoy at ITSysPro — bring the sum and we will look at it with you.